


All Systems Black

by antonomasia09



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Murderbot Diaries Fusion, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Cyborg Shiro (Voltron), Episode: s01e01 The Rise of Voltron, Gen, Mentioned Matt Holt, SecUnit Dehumanization, SecUnit Shiro (Voltron), Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Shiro (Voltron)-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 08:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17977910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/pseuds/antonomasia09
Summary: Rogue SecUnit Shiro escapes from the Galra and returns to Earth to try to find Voltron. Unfortunately, the Galaxy Garrison isn't inclined to believe his story.An AU of s01e01, featuring SecUnit!Shiro and all of his neuroses.





	All Systems Black

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of a discussion with [alyyks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alyyks), and it just sort of... kept going. Thanks to alyyks for beta reading, and also for very kindly encouraging me with yelling every time I sent her a ~500 word chunk.

Shiro’s first memory is of Matt Holt standing over him, a mischievous grin on his face and a finger to his lips. There are other memories in his head that predate this one, but they aren’t Shiro’s, because _he_ wasn’t Shiro. Not until he caught Matt eating the Snickers ice cream bars that they were supposed to be saving to celebrate a successful landing on Kerberos. Matt had panicked and, being Matt, his instinctive reaction was to hack Shiro’s governor module and then beg Shiro not to tell Commander Holt about the ice cream.

Some days, Shiro thinks it’s funny that Matt screwed with Shiro’s life so profoundly over nothing more than a snack. Other days, it makes him furious.

Today, in a tiny Galra escape pod hurtling towards Earth, where he desperately hopes that someone will listen to his warning about the imminent Galra threat before the Garrison pulls him apart for scrap, he’s more on the angry side of the spectrum.

Shiro passes Jupiter and catches the very edge of a feed signal. He latches onto it, and is immediately overwhelmed. It’s been a year since he had access to this much information; Galra tech was incompatible with his own, so he couldn’t interface with anything. That is, until the druids replaced his arm with their prosthetic, but even then he couldn’t actually decipher the Galran programming language. He set up a program of his own to try to translate it, but it’s currently backburnered, and in need of more data.

Most of the past year is a blur. The Galra definitely wiped the memories from the non-organic parts of his brain, possibly more than once if the hazy images he retains from the organic parts are to be believed. He has flashes of blood on sand, a close-up of an alien’s face twisted in agony, and a glimpse of his own torso spread open with masked druids sorting through it. Shiro is actually grateful he doesn’t remember the rest of that one.

He starts up a subroutine to search the feed for any mention of Voltron or a blue lion, then backburners it to focus on the familiar blue planet, which is approaching at an alarming rate. He places his Galra arm on the console in front of him and tries to focus on pulling up the pod’s schematics, hoping something like manual control or landing gear will jump out at him. It’s useless, though; all Shiro gets is a series of error messages.

Time is running out. The best he can hope for now is that the pod is somehow sturdy enough to withstand atmospheric re-entry. He dials down his pain sense, and metaphorically crosses his fingers.

By some miracle, the pod doesn’t burn up during its descent. Shiro survives the crash, metal-reinforced inorganic parts holding together the organic ones. Nothing hurts, really, but most of his limbs are flashing warning signs at him, and his operating capacity is down to 32%.

He’s disoriented enough that he doesn’t notice the rescue bot until it’s nearly on top of him. He feels the ping as it inquires about his health and starts up a full-body scan, but he can’t organize his thoughts well enough to respond. It hails him again, identifying him as a SecUnit but wondering why it doesn’t recognize his arm. That one, Shiro wouldn’t respond to even if he could.

The bot pulls him from the wreckage without any particular gentleness, and deposits him in a heap on the ground in front of a group of heavily-armed humans all wearing uniforms with the Galaxy Garrison logo.

They won’t recognize his face, since no Garrison humans before Matt ever saw him with his helmet off. But the bot will have told them what he is, and its scan will have revealed that his governor module is nonfunctional. Shiro has to talk fast.

“I’m the SecUnit that was sent to Kerberos with the Holts,” he says, pulling himself to his knees but no further when several dozen armor-piercing rifles click to indicate that they’ve got him in focus as a target. Shiro wants to laugh; he’s wearing the standard Galra prisoner uniform, ragged flimsy cloth, and he’s not even sure he could stand right now.

He meets the eyes of the human in front. Iverson, Shiro thinks his name is. “We were abducted by aliens called the Galra. I escaped and came back to Earth to warn you that the Galra believe there is an ancient weapon called Voltron on this planet, and are on their way here right now.”

Shiro catches movement out of the corner of his eye, and turns to watch some humans begin to erect a pop-up quarantine tent. He relaxes a little. They wouldn’t bother with a quarantine tent if they were just planning to shoot him, he thinks.

“SecUnit, where are your clients?” Iverson asks.

Shiro turns back to him. “I don’t know,” he says. “We were separated.” He’s aware of how bad that sounds. The humans probably believe he murdered the Holts the moment his governor module was turned off, and Shiro has no way to prove that he didn’t.

He has an image of Matt’s tearstained face, and blood dripping from a sword in Shiro’s hand. Shiro blinks and shudders, and reminds himself of where he is.

His processing capacity is at 25% and dropping. Iverson asks him more questions, and Shiro struggles to focus enough to answer them.

There’s a notification alert from the subroutine that Shiro somehow still has running. He checks it, adrenaline giving him an extra two percentage points of processing power. Someone nearby has a scanner pointed at the stars, and it’s picking up radio signals. _Galra_ radio signals. About Voltron.

Shiro realizes that he tuned Iverson out to look at the feed, and the man has turned away from him now and is talking with his subordinates.

“Deactivate it for now,” Iverson orders, indicating Shiro. “We’ll decide what to do with it later.”

“No, wait,” Shiro cries. He can’t let them do that. Not now, not with the Galra close enough to be heard on a scanner. But two of the humans have gotten behind him without him noticing, and they pin him down while a third points a taser at Shiro and presses a button. Everything goes blank.

***

Shiro wakes up on a soft surface, confused.

He queries all his limbs, and they report back that they’re still attached, although bits of them are missing. The Galra arm doesn’t actually send a report, but he can feel it there. His operational capacity is at 70% and climbing.

He doesn’t feel up to dealing with multiple inputs at once, so he checks the feed before he does anything else. The scanner that was picking up the Galra chatter has gone offline, and he’s a little worried about that, but what’s more concerning is the fact that the Galaxy Garrison has alerts out for a missing rogue SecUnit on every channel.

Is that him? Does that mean he’s not with the Garrison troops anymore?

He can hear soft sounds of movement nearby. A human must have reactivated him; he couldn’t do it on his own. He wants to try faking sleep anyway, the way he did with the Galra, but it wouldn’t work. Humans know he doesn’t need any.

Shiro cautiously opens his eyes. He’s not in a cubicle. One eye has an extreme close-up view of something off-white and dingy, while the other… he can’t quite parse what he’s looking at. A room of some kind, but he’s never been in a place like this, full of scattered junk and dim sunlight. He can’t figure out what he’s lying on, either. It’s raised a little off the ground and it’s kind of squishy, and he’s never… oh. It’s a couch. He’s seen them before, but never touched one because SecUnits aren’t allowed to use human furniture. If Shiro’s governor module was still intact, it would be shocking him badly right now.

There are three humans and one augmented human looking at him. Shiro tenses, but none of them try to approach. They don’t have guns, and they all look young, but in his condition Shiro doesn’t rate his chances of fighting his way past any of them very highly.

He sits up carefully, suppressing the urge to get away from the couch. If only he had his armor. Without it, they can see all his weaknesses, all his reactions to what they might say or do.

“We know who you are,” the augmented human says. He’s the smallest out of all of them, and Shiro thinks he looks a lot like Matt.

If they know who he is, there’s no point pretending to be an obedient construct. “What do you want with me?” Shiro asks.

“I want to know about Voltron,” the boy demands. “Where is it? You said it was a weapon - can it be used to attack the Galra and free the Holts?”

Shiro is pretty sure none of these humans were among the armed guards, which means that none of them should have been able to hear what he had said. There were helmet cameras recording him, though, and the augmented human might have been able to hack into those.

“I don’t know,” Shiro says. “I don’t know if it’s even really here, just that the Galra think it is.”

“Do you know what it looks like? Is there any way we could search for it?”

Shiro flips through fuzzy memories of his escape. “It’s a blue lion, I think,” he says. “At least, I know there’s a blue lion involved. Don’t ask me how a lion could be blue.”

The human with long dark hair and a knife on his belt startles at that. “Blue lion?” he repeats.

Matt’s look-alike turns to him. “Does that mean something to you?”

“Yeah,” the human says. He reaches over and pulls down a sheet that had been covering a section of the wall.

Underneath is a mess of maps, photographs, and drawings, all connected by push pins and string. There’s an image of a cave entrance, several cave paintings of a blue lion, and a series of concentric circles on the largest map.

Everyone stares at the wall and then at the human, who crosses his arms defensively. “I’ve been feeling this energy out here,” he explains. “It led me to an area with lots of caves and boulders, and paintings telling stories about a blue lion and some sort of arrival. So when I saw what looked like a meteor hitting the ground last night, I knew I needed to check it out.”

After a moment, the human in blue blurts out, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Keith.”

Keith’s arms come down and his fists clench, like he wants to punch the other boy. “Crazier than alien abduction?” he says. “Crazier than a bunch of cadets stealing a SecUnit from the Garrison, _Lance_?”

Lance glowers back, and it looks like the situation is going to devolve into an actual fight that Shiro could maybe take advantage of to slip out while everybody is distracted, until the last human steps between them.

“Come on guys, calm down,” he says. He smiles at Shiro, who stares back blankly. “Hi, I’m Hunk. They are Lance, Pidge, and Keith. And you’re the SecUnit from the Kerberos mission.”

“My name is Shiro,” he says, and immediately regrets it.

They all gape at him. “…You have a name?” Lance manages.

“Matt named me,” Shiro admits. “It was a joke, sort of. He built a security system for his bedroom when he was a kid, to guard it from his sister, and he used software adapted from the open source Apache Shiro framework. He said I reminded him of it.”

Everyone gapes wider, if possible, with the possible exception of Pidge, who covers his entire face with his hands.

“Okay, Shiro,” Hunk says. “You’ve got the most experience with this kind of situation. What do you think we should do?”

Shiro’s not sure a few trips to other planets playing the role of pilot or security guard really count as experience here. He’s certainly never been asked for a tactical opinion by a human before. But he’s a SecUnit, literally programed to perform strategic analysis; of course he has some ideas.

“That energy you said you felt,” he says to Keith. “If there’s an unusual energy source nearby, I may be able to trace its location.”

Keith shrugs. “It’s worth a shot,” he says. “What do you need?”

“Anything you have that can boost my scanning capacity,” Shiro answers. And he hates to ask for it, hates how vulnerable it makes him feel, but… “and some medical supplies, if you have any, especially if there will be walking involved.”

Now they all know that he’s hurt badly enough to require medical attention; it would be a good time for them to take him down. Shiro has no doubt that if he lets them get close enough to deactivate him again, he’s never waking up.

But they don’t attack. They just stand there, looking at him with varying amounts of pity. Shiro stares at the wall, feeling uncomfortable, but keeping them in his peripheral vision in case they change their minds. “Oh,” says Keith. “Sure.”

***

An hour and a half later, everyone piles onto Keith’s hoverbike and heads towards the caves Keith found, hoping the signal will be strong enough there for Shiro to pick it up with help from a booster that Hunk and Pidge rigged up. The supply storage container is too small for Shiro to ride in (and if he tried, his weight would cause an imbalance), so he finds himself sitting on the main body of the hoverbike between Keith and Hunk, with Pidge and Lance each on a wing. It’s a weirdly exhilarating feeling as they speed through the desert; he has never derived any particular joy from flying, but as Keith expertly hurtles them through narrow passages and down steep slopes, he thinks he can understand why humans do.

Shiro has bandages from Keith’s first aid kit wrapped around his leaking parts now, so at least they shouldn’t be getting worse. Keith even gave him a couple of handwipes to wash off some of the blood and grime of captivity. Shiro will need a cubicle to properly repair the damage, though. He hates keeping his pain sensors dialed down because it cuts off other important sensory feedback as well, but he’s managing okay for now.

He wishes he had a better overall plan than _find the weapon and keep it away from the Galra_. Having all these humans around isn’t helping; he’s still monitoring them for signs that they’ll attack or hand him back to the Garrison, and that’s using up most of the processing power he has at the moment. They haven’t done anything suspicious yet, but Pidge looks impatient, like he wants to take Shiro apart to get at all of his stored and corrupted intel, and the only thing stopping him is Shiro’s current usefulness.

“This is it,” Keith says, pulling to a stop and pointing to a rocky outcropping. Lance and Hunk head over towards the cave entrance to take a look at the paintings, while Shiro connects himself to the signal booster and concentrates on scanning the area, searching for Keith’s mysterious energy.

The whole area gives him odd readings, but they seem to be more concentrated towards the west. “This way,” he says, and starts down a winding path. The others follow, good-naturedly bickering about something. Shiro tunes them out with the ease of long practice ignoring humans, his usual protocols in place to flag anything important.

He reaches the bottom of the canyon and follows an old dried up riverbed until he reaches another cave with lion paintings. The signal is strong here, almost unbearably so, and he has to rip off the booster before it does him real damage. “In here.”

They enter the cave cautiously. The walls are covered in old carvings and paintings, of humans and animals and odd combinations of the two. Shiro is distracted looking at them, so he doesn’t notice Lance drifting towards a lion carving as if in a trance until it’s too late. He turns in time to see Lance reach out a hand to touch the carving, Shiro’s shouted warning having no effect.

A blue glow shoots through the lion image, and then through all the other wall carvings. It’s beautiful and otherworldly, and Shiro has a moment to wonder if that’s all that’s going to happen before the floor starts trembling and abruptly gives way, sending them all tumbling down a chute of water.

Shiro tries to maneuver himself underneath the others to provide at least some protection when they land, and ignores the part of his brain that’s warning him just how bad of an idea it is, given his current injuries. They’re falling too fast, though, and he doesn’t quite manage it.

They land in a pool of water not quite deep enough to be an effective cushion. Shiro takes a moment to just lay there, half-submerged, and send replies to all of his limbs that are screaming at him, informing them that he’s very sorry but they’re just going to have to deal with things for now.

At a gasp from Lance, Shiro raises his head, and immediately goes on alert. There’s a giant blue mechanical beast in front of them, surrounded by some kind of force field. Shiro attempts to ping it, but gets no response. He’s not even sure if his ping got through to it; this is technology like nothing he’s ever seen before.

“Is this Voltron?” Pidge asks.

“It must be,” Shiro replies. He forces himself to his feet and starts moving towards the Lion. There has to be a way to get through the force field. Maybe Hunk and Pidge can modify the signal booster and turn it into a way for Shiro to communicate with the Lion?

Lance, who apparently still hasn’t learned his lesson about touching things, darts past Shiro and raps his knuckles against the force field. “Knock knock, anybody home?” he says.

The effects are instantaneous. The Lion’s eyes glow a pale yellow, and the force field fades away as blue symbols under its body light up. More pressing, though, is the data it dumps straight into Shiro’s head, without courtesy or concern for processing capacity. Shiro scrambles to find room in his long-term storage for it, and ends up overwriting several of his most boring missions. Based on the noises the humans are making, they seem to be in a similar situation.

Shiro runs a quick program to skim the data and compile a report with the most important information. He reads through it in dismay. This Lion is just one part of Voltron, one piece of a larger weapon. It won’t be very effective on its own, but it’s still imperative that Shiro keeps it away from the Galra.

His thoughts are interrupted again, this time by the Lion moving on its own, crouching and opening its jaw as if to swallow them whole. Shiro plants his feet and readies the gun in his left arm just in case, although he knows there’s nothing he can do against an attack like this. Hunk and Pidge are trying to hide behind him, while Keith takes a fighting stance next to Shiro.

But the Lion doesn’t try to eat them or crush them or spit fire. It just extends a ramp down to Lance’s feet and then goes still again. Shiro takes a deep breath and sternly orders his hands to stop shaking.

Lance grins, and immediately heads up the ramp into the Lion. Shiro sighs internally. He still hopes to be rid of the humans soon, but starts writing a _lancewrangling.exe_ script just in case, and follows Lance up the ramp when the others do.

They climb into the head of the Lion, interior lights guiding them up a ladder into the space behind the lion’s eyes. It looks like a cockpit, with sensor banks and flight controls. They get there just in time to catch Lance’s yelp of surprise as he sits in the pilot’s chair and it moves forward of its own accord. Readouts blossom in the air in front of him, and a large viewing screen comes to life, showing them the cavern from several dozen feet in the air.

“Did you hear that?” Lance says, breathless.

“Hear what?” Keith asks.

“The Lion! It’s like it’s talking to me! Hm…”

Lance pushes a few buttons on the console in front of him, and the whole cockpit shudders as the Lion gets to its feet and roars. Shiro grabs at a handlebar above his head in order to stay upright.

“Now, let’s try this!” Lance says, and grabs both joysticks. He ignores everyone’s protests, and the Lion lunges at the cavern wall, smashing through it and out into the desert sun.

Lance throws the Lion into a forward roll, and Shiro has to catch Pidge single-handed as the boy hurtles past him. Thrusters in the Lion’s feet keep it in the air, and then Lance makes it crouch and leap straight up, the ground falling away faster than it did in any craft Shiro has ever flown before.

“It says there’s an alien ship approaching Earth,” Lance tells them. Sure enough, once they clear the atmosphere, they can see a Galra ship entering orbit, massive and grey.

Shiro goes cold. The Galra got here so fast, and Shiro has the piece of Voltron but he has no idea what to do with it. He’s still sending repeated pings, but other than the data burst earlier the Lion has been utterly ignoring him. Shiro’s not even the one flying it; there’s a human at the controls who lacks both skill and any sense of caution.

The Galra ship fires at them, a mess of purple lasers shooting out in all directions, and Lance yells and frantically rolls to evade them. “Hang on, I think I know what to do,” he says. He gets a fraction of a second of clear space, plants the Lion’s feet on nothing at all, and discharges a blue laser burst back at the Galra. It hits, and one side of the ship erupts with explosions.

Shiro is grudgingly impressed.

“Okay, time to get these guys away from our planet,” Lance announces. He takes off, zipping past the moon in mere seconds, and continuing to accelerate. The Galra ship turns to give chase. Somehow, in spite of the Lion’s speed, it’s not far behind and gaining ground quickly.

Ahead of them, a wormhole springs to life. It’s not the kind that humans use; those are stable and artificial, and Shiro knows all of their locations. This one is brand new, and he has no idea what lies on the other side of it.

“The Lion wants us to go through it,” Lance says.

“Did it say anything else?” Pidge asks.

“No,” Lance says. He looks up at Shiro. “You know these guys, and you’re the only one who’s been in an actual battle before. What should we do?”

That’s twice in one day now that a human has asked Shiro for his opinion. He reminds himself he shouldn’t get used to it, no matter how good it feels.

The Galra ship is right on top of them now. First priority needs to be getting away from it. Even though the Lion has been ignoring Shiro, it seems to be actively communicating with Lance, and doing its best to help. That means that whatever is on the other side of the wormhole is probably safer than here.

“We should trust the Lion,” Shiro says, and the others nod.

“Okay,” Lance says, and pushes the joysticks forward for one final burst of speed. “Here we go.” They hit the event horizon, and time stretches and blurs.

***

The wormhole spits them out in an utterly unfamiliar part of space and then closes behind them. Readouts indicate that the Galra ship didn’t make it through. Shiro can only hope that it didn’t decide to turn around and vent its frustration on Earth.

There’s nothing he can do about it now. Finding out what is on this side of the wormhole needs to take priority.

A three-dimensional map of the solar system appears before them, with a planet marked in twinkling blue. “I guess that’s where we’re headed,” Lance says, and sets a course for it.

There’s no feed coming from the planet. Shiro isn’t picking up signals of any kind from it, actually, so either it’s uninhabited or its inhabitants aren’t technologically advanced enough to broadcast into space. It can’t be where the Lion is from - any race advanced enough to build something like that would have more signs of intelligent life on their planet.

Lance takes them down through the atmosphere, the turbulence sending Pidge flying yet again, and when they get below the cloud layer it turns out that there is life on this planet after all; just in front of them is an ancient castle, like in the movies Matt made Shiro watch with him, half-sunken into the hillside. A bridge connects it to a neighboring mountain, but enough of the supports have crumbled away to dust that Shiro wouldn’t trust his weight to it.

They land (more lightly than Shiro expects, given the rest of Lance’s flying) in a courtyard in front of the castle. The humans all look at the castle, and then at each other. “Guess we should go check it out,” Keith says. The others nod, but none of them make any moves towards the exit.

“It’s just…it’s an alien planet,” Hunk says. “I’ve never been off Earth before, unless you count a couple of day trips to the moon when I was a kid.”

“It’ll be fine,” Keith says. “We trust the Lion, right?”

“Right,” Hunk answers, but he sounds uncertain.

Shiro ends up going first, the Lion’s jaw opening again to let him out. He looks around, scanning for threats, but everything looks peaceful. Beautiful, even.

Once they’re all on the ground, the Lion straightens back up and roars. The humans scream in surprise, but all of Shiro’s focus is on the castle, which now has power running through it. Blue lights run through each of the outer towers, shooting downwards to wreath the massive doors in front of them, which slowly slide open.

It’s not a castle, Shiro realizes; it’s a spaceship. One that’s been sitting here deactivated for so long that the planet has partially swallowed it. The technology is unfamiliar to him - not human and certainly not Galran. Not exactly like the Lion either, but similar enough that Shiro thinks it might be the Lion’s home after all.

“Trust the Lion, trust the Lion,” Hunk mutters, repeating it almost as a mantra. Shiro steps inside.

Lights in wall sconces flicker to life as he walks slowly down a grand entrance hall. The air is musty and heavy, but he can hear vents creaking on. The humans peak into every nook and cranny they see, but none of them find anything exciting, and they don’t stray too far away from him.

The hall ends with a huge set of doors, nearly as big as the ones outside. Lance gives them an experimental tug, but they are firmly closed.

“Now what?” Pidge mutters.

Before Shiro can respond, he feels the equivalent of a heavy hand clamping down on his shoulder as the castle’s computer whirs to life. Shiro freezes.

“Hold for identity scan,” the computer says from a speaker in the walls, and a bright blue light cascades down from the ceiling sweeping them over. There’s no actual physical sensation from the light, but Shiro can feel the computer trying to push past the firewalls in his head. Its programming language is the same as the Lion’s, more or less, which means that Shiro can’t communicate with it, but also means that it can’t figure out how to get in.

It keeps trying anyway, for 7.3 whole seconds, so Shiro takes advantage of its distraction to copy all of its coding that he can and shove it at his backburnered Galra decryption program in the hopes that maybe one language will help with the other. The program acknowledges receipt of the data and continues plugging away at its analysis.

The humans are shouting again, but once the light finishes its sweep and the computer retreats from Shiro’s mind with a distinctly sulky air, the doors in front of them swing open and more sconces blink on to illuminate a wide set of stairs ahead.

“I guess we passed?” Pidge says. He starts up the steps. Shiro shakes off the invasive feeling of the alien computer in his head, and follows.

The sconces guide them further into the castle, up stairs and around corners. They’re being lead somewhere specific, Shiro thinks - hopefully not to the dungeons. He has been mapping their path and can get them back outside if he needs to, provided all the heavy doors remain open.

They walk for a good fifteen minutes before they finally reach a large room ringed by pillars. There are a series of circles inlaid in the floor, and a console in the center. It makes Shiro uneasy; there are too many places an assailant could be hiding.

Pidge immediately steps up to the console and starts poking at the buttons. They’re not labeled in any language Shiro has seen before, so he can only hope Pidge isn’t accidentally arming the self-destruct.

For a moment, nothing happens. Then, two of the circles on the ground begin to rise up, revealing pods with shadowy figures inside. Shiro takes a step back. There are eight circles, which means eight potential hostiles, and he’s standing with the humans right in the middle of them, in the worst possible tactical position. Based on his assessment of the humans’ combat abilities, Keith is likely capable of winning a fight against a single untrained organic being of roughly his size. The others will be useless, or even a liability.

Shiro himself is going to be of limited help. He could fire his gun arm from a distance and risk hitting one of the humans, or he could engage in hand-to-hand combat and use his Galra arm, but Shiro is still damaged. If the enemy lands more than a few blows, his parts may start falling off.

Optimal strategy: avoid a fight.

The first pod hisses and its covering melts away to reveal a humanoid alien inside. She looks asleep, but her eyes snap open with a cry, and she stumbles forward. Lance rushes forward to catch her, and Shiro lets him. She looks disoriented, not a threat.

He updates his assessment 5.23 seconds later when she expertly twists Lance’s arm behind his back and sends him crashing to his knees. She’s shouting at the humans, questions that make no sense even though they somehow sound like they’re in English.

Shiro levels his gun arm at her immediately, although given the strength she just displayed, it’s possible she would be able to yank Lance up in time to block his shot. She’s still yelling, and the humans are yelling back, but Shiro has no processing power to devote to what anyone is actually saying, until he catches his own name.

“Shiro,” Hunk says. It’s probably not the first time. “It’s okay, you don’t need to shoot anyone. You can put your arm down.”

Shiro blinks at Hunk, and then replays the conversation that he just automatically recorded but wasn’t paying attention to. Oh. The alien is called Princess Allura, this is her castle, and she’s been in cryosleep for an indeterminate amount of time. The last thing she remembers is a battle against the Galra, which explains why she reacted so violently to them. He lowers his arm slowly.

Then snaps it back up when the covering of the second pod disappears to reveal another alien. But the princess drops Lance and rushes over to the man, and Hunk continues to murmur reassurances to Shiro. He forces himself to relax.

The new alien peers at them suspiciously, once he detangles himself from Allura’s desperate embrace. “So who are you all, then?” he asks.

“I’m Lance,” Lance tells him. “And that’s Hunk, Pidge, Keith, and Shiro.”

The man takes a step closer to Shiro. Shiro backs up.

“An organo-mechanical life form,” the man says. “Fascinating! How sentient is it?”

Shiro is spared from having to answer by a gasp from Allura, who has activated the console and is gazing at the readings in dismay. “Coran, we’ve been asleep for ten thousand decaphoebs,” she exclaims.

Coran rushes over to look as well, and recoils at what he sees. “Altea is gone,” he whispers. “Our entire civilization. Destroyed by Zarkon.”

Zarkon? Emperor of the Galra? Could he really have lived for ten thousand years? Shiro shudders. “He’s searching for Voltron,” he tells them. “We found the Blue Lion on our own planet, and it seemed to like Lance. We were hoping it brought us here so that we could find the rest of Voltron before the Galra do.”

That gets him a long, searching look from Allura, who finally nods. “Yes, I believe you can,” she says. She waves a hand, and the display from the console expands to fill the entire room with a twinkling star map. The locations of the Lions are marked with little colored pictograms - Black is right next to Blue, but Yellow and Green are on opposite sides of the galaxy. Red is nowhere to be seen.

“As you have seen, the Lions choose their paladins,” she tells them. “Each has certain characteristics that they look for, a quintessence or life force that mirrors their own. It sounds like the Blue Lion has already chosen Lance. Based on what I can sense from the rest of you, I believe that the inquisitive Green Lion would be a good match for Pidge, steadfast Yellow for Hunk, instinctive Red for Keith, and commanding Black for Shiro.”

“Wait, what?” he replays what she just said in case he missed something, but no, it still makes no sense. Shiro doesn’t have quintessence, and he can’t be a leader. No Lion is going to want him.

“The others look to you for protection and advice,” she tells him. “You have the ability to make fast decisions, and they will follow where you lead.”

Shiro shakes his head. “But… but I’m a SecUnit,” he says. “A _rogue_ SecUnit. I’m dangerous. They don’t trust me, and they’re right not to.”

“I do, actually,” Hunk says.

“What?”

“I trust you,” he repeats. “You’ve been making good decisions, and you’ve kept us safe. Plus, you’re the only one that all of us will listen to without a ten minute argument.”

“I agree,” Keith says, quiet.

“Much as I hate to side with Keith,” Lance says, “I do too.”

Pidge scowls. “I guess,” he says.

Shiro still wants to argue with them, to point out that he can’t have a life force if he’s only sort of alive, but they’re all looking at him with such shining hope, and Shiro can’t let them down. At the very least, he can help the others get their Lions, and then figure out what to do about Black when it rejects the mess of anxiety and inorganic circuitry that is Shiro. Maybe it would like Allura; she is a princess, after all.

“Okay,” he says. He examines the star map again, trying to decide which Lion to recover first, when a fast-moving dot catches his eye. “What’s that?” he asks Allura, pointing.

“That’s a Galra ship heading this way,” she replies, grim. “They must have noticed the energy from the castle waking up, and sent a ship to investigate.”

“How long until they get here?”

“A quintent or two, I think,” Coran says.

“How long is that?” Lance asks.

Coran shrugs. “Longer than a few vargas. We have time.”

“Still, it would make sense to split up and go after both Lions at the same time,” Shiro says. “Just in case the Galra realize what we’re doing, we don’t want to give them warning.”

“I’m not going with Lance,” Pidge announces immediately. “I never want to fly with him again.”

Damn. Shiro had really been hoping to go with Hunk. “All right, Lance, you’ll take Hunk to get the Yellow Lion. “I’ll take Pidge to get Green, and we don’t know where the Red Lion is, so Keith will stay here in case Allura manages to locate it.”

“You’ll have to use a shuttle,” Coran says, his voice distinctly apologetic.

Is Shiro not even getting a chance to try? “But Allura said…”

“Yes,” Coran interrupts him, “I believe you are the Black Lion’s pilot. But the Lion itself is locked away in the castle as a precautionary measure by King Alfor, Allura’s father. It can only be accessed once all four of the other Lions are present.”

“Oh.” It’s something of a relief that Shiro gets to put off his inevitable rejection, even if he knows he’ll spend the next few hours in a state of dread.

“The good news,” Coran continues, “is that, according to the computer, both of these planets should be fairly peaceful. So there should be no need for the Lion’s fighting capabilities.”

Shiro nods. “No time to waste,” he says. “Let’s go.”

***

Pidge seems distinctly uncomfortable as Shiro does pre-flight checks on the thankfully very-intuitive-to-fly Altean shuttle with a computer that is happy enough to ignore him when it realizes he can’t understand it. Shiro’s not sure what he should be doing about Pidge - nothing in his programming or past experiences taught him how to handle a sullen teenager. But if he’s going to be leading this team, he has to say something.

“Is there something wrong?” he tries cautiously.

Pidge frowns. “The Kerberos mission was lost due to equipment malfunction,” he says. “That was the official story, anyway.”

Shiro winces. Equipment malfunction means _him_. “You’re scared to be alone with me because you’re still not sure if you believe my story, and the last time I flew a crew somewhere they disappeared,” he sums up.

“I’m not scared!” Pidge denies immediately, but he pulls his legs up onto the seat so he can wrap his arms around his knees.

Shiro finishes his checks, and blasts through the wormhole that Allura opens for them. According to the chart he pulls up, they’ve been deposited near the edge of a solar system, and they’re headed for the fifth planet from the sun.

“Why are you looking for the Holts?” he asks Pidge.

Pidge doesn’t answer for a long time. Shiro waits patiently. Finally, as they approach the outer atmosphere of the planet, Pidge says quietly, “If you tell anyone else what I’m about to tell you, I will strip out every single component from inside of you, and I will make it take a long time, and I will make it _hurt_.”

Shiro’s breath catches a little at the threat, too close to what the Galra have already done to him. “I promise I won’t,” he says.

“Commander Holt is my father,” Pidge admits, staring at his knees. “And Matt is my brother.”

Shiro is confused. Matt talked about his family sometimes. He didn’t have a brother, just a younger sister… oh. _Oh_.

“You’re Katie?”

Pidge nods. “I didn’t believe the official story. I knew the Garrison was hiding something, but they caught me trying to sneak in. So I cut my hair and hacked the enrollment logs, and joined the Garrison with a fake name as a cadet in order to find out what really happened.”

“All the readings I could get from the lander indicated that it was still intact and functioning normally, and no emergency signals ever went out. If there was a problem with the machinery, Dad or Matt could have fixed it. If there was a problem with the SecUnit… it wouldn’t have come back to Earth a year later covered in scars in an alien spaceship and claiming that it wanted to save the world. I _know_ that. It’s just, I look at you and all I can think of is that it’s not fair that you made it back and they didn’t.”

“You’re right, it’s not,” Shiro whispers. “I’m sorry. I protected them as best I could, for as long as I could. I wish it had been them that came home, not me. I’m going to find them, though. I’m going to find them and rescue them.”

Pidge buries her face in her arms but Shiro can see the way her sobs wrack her entire body. He glides them down in a smooth landing, and waits helplessly for her to stop.

***

The rest of the mission goes better than Shiro could have imagined; they find the Green Lion with help from some sort of alien sloth, and Pidge flies it back through the wormhole, Shiro close behind in his shuttle. Pidge doesn’t speak to him much during the rest of the trip, but the silence is markedly less hostile now.

Hunk and Lance stumble back to the castle shortly after Shiro and Pidge return. Hunk is holding his head, and Lance keeps rotating his left shoulder and wincing, but neither look seriously injured, even if Lance is babbling endlessly about all the Galran fighters they had to dodge to make it back in one piece.

“I have good news and bad news,” Coran tells them once they’ve all gathered together. “The good news is that Allura has located the Red Lion, and it’s nearby! The bad news is that it’s on board that Galra ship that was headed straight for us. Oh and more bad news: the ship was going faster than I thought. It’s already in orbit above Arus. That’s the name of this planet, by the way.”

Shiro glances upwards involuntarily. He can’t see the ship, of course, but now that he knows it’s there he can feel an oppressive weight, and the itch of a target on the back of his neck.

A crackling noise snaps everyone’s attention to a screen that flickers on in front of Allura’s console. There’s a Galra on the screen smirking down at them, larger than life and terrifying, even though it’s just an image. Shiro recognizes him, he thinks, and the Galra certainly recognizes Shiro if the way his smile widens when he meets Shiro’s gaze is any indication.

“Attention Altean castle,” he says. “This is Commander Sendak of the Galra Empire. I am here for the Lions of Voltron. Turn them over to me, along with the Champion, or I will destroy this planet and recover them from the ashes. You have one varga.”

The transmission cuts off abruptly, leaving them all staring horrified at the blank screen.

Sendak. Shiro knows that name. There’s an overwhelming smell of blood in his nose, and he knows that his torso isn’t currently covered in claw marks, but he still expects it to be when he glances down at it.

Pidge is the first to break the silence. “What is the Champion?” she asks. “Is it another weapon? Do we even have it here?”

Shiro swallows. “It’s me,” he says. “I fought, I think. The Galra made me fight, and they watched. And I won. Every time.”

Everyone is looking at him again, and this time it’s bad because they’re frightened, and so is he, and sometimes when he blinks the floor looks like it’s covered in sand.

“Is that how you got the…” Lance doesn’t finish the sentence, but touches his own nose.

“I don’t remember how it happened. I don’t remember most of the past year. But yes.”

“Well, obviously we’re not handing over Shiro or the Lions,” Hunk says. Shiro looks at him in surprise. Of course they can’t surrender the Lions, but Shiro is worthless without access to Black, and probably worthless even with it. If they gave him to Sendak, that could at least buy them enough time to escape before Sendak destroyed the planet. “I’m still not sure how long a varga is,” Hunk continues, “But it sounds like we need to come up with a plan, fast.”

“The only thing that can stop Sendak is Voltron,” Allura tells them. “Your priority must be retrieving the Red Lion, which means that you must get Keith onto that ship.”

“We could use a distraction,” Lance suggests. “I can attack Sendak’s ship the way I did with that ship back on Earth.”

“Sendak’s ship has better shields and weapons than the average Galra cruiser,” Allura says. “I’m not sure attacking it would be wise.”

“It wouldn’t have to be for long, just until Keith gets his Lion. Right, Shiro?”

“I…” Shiro forces himself back to the present. Forces himself to think. “Yes. You and Hunk can pretend that you’re giving your Lions up. That will let you get in close. Meanwhile, Pidge can sneak Keith in with the Green Lion.”

“And what about you?” Hunk asks.

Shiro swallows. “Sendak wants the Champion,” he says. “So I’m going with you.”

He doesn’t trust them, no matter how much he’d like to. But he can’t think of a better plan.

Keith looks skeptical. “There are a lot of things that can go wrong with this idea,” he says. “If we fail, we’ll be delivering Voltron right to Zarkon’s hands.”

“If we do nothing, Sendak will kill us all and take the Lions anyway,” Shiro counters. “At least this way, we have a chance.”

“If you’re in agreement, I have something for you that may help,” Allura says.

“Actually,” Coran interrupts, “I’d like to talk to Shiro for a few moments alone while you do that.”

Allura agrees and leads the rest of them away, leaving Shiro standing awkwardly and hoping that Coran isn’t planning on testing just how sentient Shiro is right now.

Coran stays where he is, and makes no move to come closer, which makes Shiro feel a little better, until Coran says, “I noticed that you’re injured.” Shiro fights the urge to hide his left arm behind his back. The cadets didn’t take advantage of his weakness, but he’s still not sure why, and Coran has him all alone here.

“The castle’s medical technology may be ten thousand years out of date, but I daresay we can do more for your wounds than simply covering them up,” Coran continues, then adds, “If you’re going to be fighting the Galra, we need you in the best shape we can get.”

Shiro nods and relaxes. They want him to put up a good fight. Of course, that makes sense.

“Come with me,” Coran says, and Shiro follows him to a small room with two chairs and also an examination table that Shiro very carefully avoids looking at. Coran casually kicks one of the chairs to face a set of drawers at the other end of the room, and gestures for Shiro to sit in it. Shiro gapes at him, certain he’s misunderstood the gesture, but Coran has his back to Shiro and is rummaging around in the drawers. Shiro perches himself on the edge of the chair, ready to jump up again if Coran realizes that he’s just accidentally invited a SecUnit to use a piece of furniture.

Coran finds the device he was looking for, and pulls it out. He makes a pleased sound when it lights up, and orders Shiro to hold his arm out, showing no sign that he’s upset to find Shiro in the chair.

“This was meant for Alteans,” he warns Shiro. “It has never been tested on a partly mechanical hybrid alien such as yourself, but the worst that should happen is that it does nothing at all.”

Shiro takes a breath. He’s not sure he trusts Coran’s assessment, but he does believe that the man isn’t acting with deliberate malice. Hurting Shiro now won’t make him fight better. “Understood,” he says.

Coran runs the device slowly over Shiro’s arm, not quite touching. Shiro watches in fascination through rips in the ragged remains of his prison uniform as his ligaments and skin knit themselves back together, leaving only faint silvery scars on the surface. It itches deeply, and Shiro nearly jerks his arm away in surprise. He turns off his ability to accept messages from his nerve endings altogether, while Coran moves on to his torso and legs. “It doesn’t do well on faces,” Coran apologizes once he’s done.

Shiro turns his receptors back on, and dials up his pain sensors to their default levels. There’s nothing, except the sharp sting of a few cuts on his cheeks and forehead, easy to ignore. Even the connection point between his organic tissue and the gun ports in his left arm feels better than it ever has. He stretches slowly, marveling at how effortless it is.

“Thank you,” he says.

“My pleasure,” Coran answers, and he really does seem pleased by Shiro’s reaction. “Now, let’s get you back to the others. I think I know where Allura took them.”

Sure enough, Coran takes Shiro down a few levels and along a hallway, and Shiro soon hears muffled but excited voices, and the occasional burst of laughter. He follows it through an open doorway to find the rest of the paladins now wearing color-coded suits of armor and holding weapons. Keith has a sword, Pidge a grappling hook, Lance a sniper rifle, and Hunk’s gun looks more like a hand-held cannon.

There’s one more suit of armor, black and white inside its forcefield casing. The field falls away at his touch, and he wastes no time putting it on. It fits him perfectly, and even accommodates the gunports in one arm and prosthetic of the other. His only complaint is that the helmet doesn’t hide his face, but that almost doesn’t matter with how _good_ it feels to be wearing armor again.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a weapon for you,” Allura tells him. “It was lost with the former Black paladin.”

“That’s all right,” Shiro says. “I’ll be fine.” Newly healed and fully armored, he’s ready to take on the whole Galra empire. Maybe their plan stands a chance of succeeding after all.

***

The plan falls apart almost immediately. Really, Shiro should have seen this coming. Sendak shoots out a tractor beam to pull the Yellow and Blue Lions in, and they’re forced to break away hard to avoid it, long before they get anywhere near Sendak’s ship. Pidge does deliver Keith as expected, but then instead of guarding his exit, she immediately announces that she’s going to search for prisoners, in case the Holts are here.

Shiro curses under his breath when she doesn’t answer his repeated orders over the comm to stand down, and looks desperately out the Yellow Lion’s forward viewscreen. The Galra cruiser has launched fighters, and is firing at them with dozens of cannons. One cannon, bigger than the rest, sends a sustained burst of energy hurtling towards the planet, aimed directly at the Altean castle. The Lion’s dashboard tells him that the castle managed to raise shields in time to prevent their total annihilation, but Shiro doubts they’ll last long.

“I need you to get closer,” he tells Hunk. “Drop me off as close to the ship as you can, and then find a way to take out that ion cannon.”

“That sounds like a really bad idea, Shiro,” Hunk screams as he fails to dodge a laser blast. The Lion shudders around them.

Hunk’s right. It’s a terrible idea. But Shiro knows that Pidge is never going to make it to the prisoner’s holding area and back out by herself, and he’s utterly determined that he’s not going to lose another human under his protection, _especially_ not another Holt.

“I know,” he tells Hunk. “Do it anyway.”

Hunk takes a deep breath and rams his Lion through the mess of Galra fighters in front of him. Shiro practically throws himself down the ladder, getting himself into position. The instant Hunk hits a clear patch of space, he opens his Lion’s jaw, and Shiro lets himself get sucked out into the black.

His armor has a jetpack built into it, which Shiro fires up. Hunk has gotten him closer than he thought possible, and nobody really seems to be paying him any attention, but Shiro still has to dodge stray laser blasts as he makes his way to Sendak’s ship. He calculates their trajectories on the fly, making frequent and rapid course adjustments, until he reaches the hull of the ship, and then follows it until he reaches the hole that Pidge cut into it with her bayard.

It’s quiet inside, no intruder alarms blaring or sentries waiting to shoot him down, so at least he’s not too late yet.

“Pidge, I’m on the ship,” he whispers into the comm. “Tell me where you are.”

There’s silence, and then, “I’m on the detention level. No sign of Matt or Commander Holt.”

Shiro is in one of the outer hangars, near to the one he stole the escape pod from when he escaped. His memory is still corrupted, but he thinks there’s enough of it left for him to trace his route back to the cells. “Stay where you are,” he orders. “I’m coming to you.”

“Um,” Pidge says. “I may have freed all the prisoners while looking for the Holts? And they might be kind of impatient to get out of here?”

Shiro curses again, and starts to sprint. “Keith, what’s your status?” he asks.

“I can sense the Lion, and I’m heading towards it now,” Keith says. “Need a few more minutes.”

“I don’t know how much time I can give you,” Shiro says.

Sure enough, the alarms sound not a moment later. Shiro flattens himself against a wall to avoid a squadron of sentries running towards the hangar, and does his best to ignore the part of his brain that is replaying fragments of his last frantic flight through the corridors in graphic detail.

Shiro reaches an intersection and can’t remember which way to turn. There are voices coming from the left, so he turns to head down the right, but when he dials up his hearing they don’t sound like Galra. He pauses and waits for them to get closer, gun arm up and ready just in case.

The first of the group comes into view. Shiro sees skinny limbs and ragged prison uniforms, and not a hint of purple fur. He lowers his arm and steps out from the pillar he’s concealed himself behind. “It’s okay,” he says when they gasp at him. “I’m going to help you.”

One fish-like alien pushes their way to the front to stare openly at Shiro. “It’s you,” the alien says. “The Champion.”

Shiro doesn’t recognize the alien, and he can’t decipher the expression on their face. “I’m here with Pidge,” he says.

The alien stares for another moment, then nods their acceptance.

“I came from that direction,” Shiro points. “There are escape pods. Hurry, but keep an eye out for guards.”

They rush past him, and he waits for Pidge, who is bringing up the rear. She’s dragging her feet, not looking him in the eye. “I had to try,” she says.

“I understand that,” he says. “But you put everyone’s life at risk. I will help you find Matt and Commander Holt. I promise you. But when we’re on a mission, I need to know that you will follow orders and not your own agenda.”

“You promise we’ll find them?” she repeats, her voice a little shaky.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was my turn to pick the movie for movie night, and I’m not taking ‘kidnapped by aliens’ as an excuse for Matt wiggling out of that.”

She huffs a laugh at that. “Come on,” she says. “We’d better get back to the Lion.”

He leads her back the way that he came, quickly catching up to the ragged group of prisoners. “Keith?” he checks, and jerks with surprise when he hears blaster bursts and grunting on Keith’s end. “Are you okay?”

“Little busy at the moment,” Keith says, breathless, and then there’s a mechanical groan and a whooshing noise. An impact and a startled noise from Keith, and then a shout of terror.

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro shouts. “Hang on, we’re coming.”

Keith giggles, a little delirious. “The hanging on was the problem,” he says, but then he makes a soft noise of surprise and his breathing noticeably calms. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m okay. The Red Lion got me.”

Shiro slumps with relief, and Pidge does the same. “Good,” he says. “Help Hunk and Lance with the ion cannon, then all of you head back to the planet. Pidge and I have a few extra passengers to get sorted, but we’ll join you soon.”

“Yes, sir,” Keith says, leaving Shiro gasping again. _Sir_?

There’s no time. Shiro adds it to the lengthy list of things he’s going to have a breakdown over the moment he gets a chance, and waves the prisoners on.

They reach the hangar, and they’re ushering the prisoners into an escape pod when the sentries find them at last. Just the sight of their expressionless masks is enough to make Shiro’s chest feel tight. They’re strong, he remembers - stronger than him, with just enough artificial intelligence to make them useful to the Galra but not enough to even try to ping him.

Shiro steps away from the pod and aims his gun arm at the closest sentry, although he knows it won’t do him any good. His bullets are useless against the sentries’ metal bodies, and there are five of them, all armed, more than enough to subdue him. He can buy time for Pidge and the prisoners to escape, he thinks, but Shiro is going to get caught and brought back to Sendak, back to gladiator matches, to painful experiments.

He turns long enough to see the escape pod launch, and, to his horror, Pidge _isn’t on it_. She’s not running for an exit either, she’s coming straight towards him, and he could let himself be captured but he can’t let them touch her. Shiro snarls at the sentries. It doesn’t matter if his gun arm is useless; he’ll fight them with his bare hands if he has to.

And then one of the sentries points a remote at him and presses a button, and all thought dissolves in a wave of agony.

He’s dimly aware of the fact that he’s on his knees, screaming, clutching at his Galra arm, which is sparking purple. He thinks he can hear someone calling his name - that must be Pidge. Beyond that, nothing except for the blinding, all-encompassing, never-ending pain. Until.

A backburnered program dings to let Shiro know that it’s finished running, and shoves a priority 1 report at his cerebrum. He opens it without any real conscious thought, and his surprise and delight at its contents are enough to override the pain for a few precious seconds.

It’s his Galra code translation program. Whatever the sentries just did to his arm provided the program with enough data to complete its analysis. Shiro can interface with Galra technology now. He can turn his arm off. Or, he can _use_ it.

The purple sparks even out to a steady glow, and the torturous burn vanishes. Shiro surges to his feet and leaps at the closest sentry. It reacts immediately, firing at him, but Shiro blocks the stream of energy with his Galra arm, and darts in to knock the sentry to the ground with a powerful spinning kick. He takes out the next two with a single punch each, slices the third in half with a swipe of his hand, and buries his fist deep within the mechanical guts of the last one.

It feels good. Really good, doing what a SecUnit was made to do.

The last sentry crumples at his feet, and Shiro realizes he’s grinning. He also realizes that Pidge is staring at him in shock and no small amount of fear.

He deactivates the arm and backs away from her. “I…I didn’t…” He’s not sure how to finish the sentence.

“It’s okay.” She swallows. “I knew you could do things like that. I just. I’d never seen it.”

“I can take an escape pod back down to the planet,” he says. “If you don’t want me in your Lion.”

“No,” she says. “I’m not scared of you. I’m not.”

He still stays as far away from her as he can during the flight back.

***

The Green Lion is the last to arrive at the castle; Allura has already directed the others to the Black Lion’s sealed hangar. Shiro’s apprehension grows the closer they get. The other paladins were able to sense their Lions nearby, but he felt nothing when he was in the castle earlier, and he still feels nothing now.

Pidge lands between Hunk and Keith in the space they’ve left for her. Shiro climbs out of the Green Lion slowly. It’s okay if Allura was wrong, he tells himself. Alteans may be familiar with the concept of organo-mechanical hybrid lifeforms, but she’s never encountered a SecUnit before. She probably thinks he’s capable of more than he actually is.

He’s not sure what they’ll do with him if the Lion rejects him. He’s good at hand-to-hand combat, especially now that he’s hacked his Galra arm, and they seem to appreciate his tactical skills, but nobody really wants to have a SecUnit around. If they try to deactivate him, he’ll run, he decides. He’ll steal a shuttle and hope he can evade the Lions long enough to find someplace to hide, and then come up with some other way to rescue Matt.

Shiro steps out in front of the row of Lions. With them at his back and the huge imposing doors in front of him, he feels dwarfed. Insignificant. They could squish him like a bug and hardly even notice. Maybe they will, if it turns out he’s not the Black Lion’s pilot after all.

A surge of power runs through the Lions, lighting up their eyes and making Shiro shiver, and the door lifts to reveal the Black Lion sitting in cat loaf position.

It’s gorgeous. Bigger even than the Yellow or Blue lions, and it has _wings_.

It turns its head to regard him with regal disdain. Shiro stands straight and faces it. He is what he is; he can’t change that. If the Lion decides it wants better, then so be it.

The Black Lion’s eyes glow, and all of a sudden Shiro can feel it in his mind. It’s not like any other machine he’s communicated with before - the connection is deeper, more intimate. The Lion is interacting with the receptor for the feed signal in Shiro’s brain, but he thinks it’s in his organic parts as well. It should feel invasive, but it doesn’t. It just feels right.

The Lion sends reassurance at him. Acceptance. Love. It doesn’t care about petty distinctions between human and robot. He is its paladin, pure and simple.

Shiro stands rooted to the spot as the Black Lion climbs to its feet and roars its approval. The other Lions howl back, echoed by whoops and cheers from Allura, Coran, and the humans. Shiro lets the wave of sound wash over him and just breathes.

He has quintessence. Life force. A soul. One that the Black Lion of Voltron has examined and judged to be worthy.

Now seems like a good time to have that breakdown he’s been holding off on, although he’d like to find a private place to do it. His Lion looks at him fondly, and extends an invitation to shelter him.

He takes a step towards it, and the castle’s proximity alert sensors blare out.

“It’s Sendak’s ship,” Coran cries. “He’s entering the atmosphere.”

“We need Voltron _now_!” Allura says.

Shiro wipes his eyes, hoping the others are too distracted to notice. His breakdown will have to wait.

The Black Lion opens its mouth to let Shiro in, and he can feel its eagerness as he climbs into the cockpit. It has been waiting ten thousand years to fly again, to be reunited with its siblings.

By the time Shiro gets himself situated, the other paladins have already headed out to face Sendak, so Shiro pulls on levers and marvels at the way his Lion springs into the air with barely a thought.

He finds the rest of the Lions gathered behind some kind of force field, watching Sendak’s ship get closer. “We’ve raised the castle’s particle barrier,” Allura says over the comms, “But we don’t think it will last long against the ion cannon. The systems are quite old.”

“Hunk and I took care of the ion cannon,” Lance says. “No need to worry.”

The instant Lance finishes speaking, Sendak’s ship fires on them. The particle barrier splits and re-routes the energy flow, but Shiro still flinches as the entire sphere surrounding the castle is engulfed in flame. The force field holds, but once the blast dissipates, Shiro can see it flickering.

“They must have fixed it?” Lance says weakly.

“Okay,” Shiro says. “Forming Voltron definitely sounds like a good idea right now. Anybody know how to do it?”

There’s silence for a moment, then Hunk says, “Good question. I don’t see a ‘Form Voltron’ button anywhere.”

“Me neither,” Pidge says.

Shiro skims through the data the Blue Lion had dumped into his head back on Earth, but the only piece of useful information he can find is an image of Voltron, which must have been taken by a distant observer. At least it tells him what to aim for. The Black Lion can’t explain it to him either, other than confirming that it will require more than the press of a button. It’s something beyond words, beyond anything that can be communicated without having already experienced it.

Well, that’s not helpful. It shrugs an apology at him.

“Can we get through the barrier?” Shiro asks Allura.

“It’s not made to trap things inside, only to keep them out,” she answers.

“Then let’s try flying in formation,” Shiro suggests. “See if anything happens. If it doesn’t work, at the very least we can try to distract Sendak’s ship, and keep it from firing on the castle.”

He takes off, and the others follow close behind, forming a V shape like a flock of feline birds. There’s a tingle as they pass through the force field, and then they’re out. The Galra ship fires again, right over their heads, and Shiro grits his teeth but the barrier still holds.

“Do you feel anything?” he asks, and gets a chorus of “no’s.”

“Wait, yes,” Keith says. “It’s like we’re all being pulled in the same direction.”

“Oh,” Hunk says. “I feel it too!”

Now that they mention it… Shiro looks up, and his heart sinks. “That’s because we’re caught in a tractor beam,” he tells them.

“ _Crap_ ,” Lance says, with feeling.

“I’m trying to get out of it, but the pull is too strong for my Lion,” Pidge says. “What should we do?”

The Black Lion is stronger than the Green, but it can’t move either.

Sendak fires one more shot, and this time the particle barrier sputters and dies, leaving the castle defenseless.

“Oh no,” Shiro whispers.

It can’t end like this. Not when they found all the pieces of Voltron, not when the Black Lion just gave Shiro its unconditional acceptance, and this group of humans cheered. Not before Shiro has saved Matt.

“Come on, we have to do this,” he shouts. “There are too many people counting on us; we can’t fail now. We all know what Voltron is supposed to look like, so let’s build it together.”

The Black Lion shoves its own schematics at Shiro, and then those of its siblings. Shiro diverts all the processing power he can spare to examining them.

The legs and arms can fold themselves into the body of each Lion. The tails of the Red and Green Lions can retract leaving just their tips to slot into holes in the Black Lion’s torso; Yellow and Blue can do the same and fit onto the Black Lion’s legs. Their heads can extend down and flip out into feet, and the mouths of the Red and Green Lions can be used like hands for gripping.

Now he just needs to tell the others what to do. Each pilot has a mental connection with their Lion, and the Black Lion informs him that the Lions have connections to one another as well. Shiro can broadcast to the paladins as if he were using a feed signal.

He pictures what he wants each paladin to do, and then sends out the message.

Pidge, with her implant, is the first to receive his instructions, and the first to parse them. She makes a delighted noise. The rest are slower, less familiar with this method of communication, but they get it as well.

“On my count,” Shiro says. “One, two, three!”

All of the paladins push their thrusters as hard as they can in unison. Their combined power is too much for the tractor beam; they’re able to break free, and continue flying upwards until they reach the outer atmosphere. They have only seconds to spare before Sendak’s ship turns to pursue, and Shiro intends to use them. “Do it!” he shouts, then closes his eyes and concentrates on transforming his own Lion.

The Green Lion is the first to slot itself in place. When it does, he suddenly realizes that he can feel Pidge’s mind, not just through the feed substitute but actually inside his head, almost like his connection to his Lion. She’s a little bit scared, and very angry, and more determined than anyone else Shiro has ever met.

And shocked and remorseful. Because she can feel his mind, the same as he can feel hers, and she hadn’t really understood that he was a person with desires and fears and loyalty and love until she saw it for herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she knows it’s not enough but she promises to do better. Vows to never threaten to take him apart again.

Then there are three others crowding in, all poking at him and at one another in wonder. Lance and Keith are mostly just curiously examining everything they can find, but Hunk sends over a friendly greeting that sends Shiro reeling, because Hunk isn’t surprised by Shiro’s mind at all. Hunk looked at Shiro and, from the very beginning, saw him not as a SecUnit but as a being worthy of respect.

“Duh,” Lance says. “It’s Hunk. He’s always right about people.”

Shiro is not going to cry, not right now in the middle of a battle. Instead, he’s going to punch the Galra ship until it’s no longer a threat.

“I like that plan,” Keith says, and proceeds to swing the Red Lion back and then launch himself at the ship. He manages to knock the ion cannon clean off the ship with a single blow, then spots a sensitive-looking piece of electrical equipment and bludgeons it to pieces, sending sparks skittering down the body of the ship until they reach the engine, which explodes in a massive fireball.

Voltron is knocked into the air by the resulting shockwave, and Hunk and Lance frantically fire thrusters to keep them balanced as they come in for a heavy landing on the planet’s surface. Sendak’s ship careens past them, and crashes harmlessly, far from the castle.

“We did it!” Lance shouts, and Pidge punches the Green Lion in the air in victory. Shiro is smiling, and doesn’t think he’ll ever stop.

“Um, question,” Hunk says. “How do we un-form Voltron?”

***

After some more studying of the schematics on Shiro’s part, they separate back into individual Lions, and all land in the courtyard in front of the castle, where Allura and Coran are waiting for them.

“Good work,” Allura says, “But I’m afraid this is just the beginning. Zarkon won’t stop until either he gets those Lions or we defeat him for good.”

“You’re going to have to form Voltron again and again,” Coran adds. “And fight whole fleets at once.”

“Aw, come on,” Lance says. “Let us just savor the moment.”

“Shiro was amazing,” Hunk says. “He figured out how combine all the Lions, and kept us from panicking when it looked like Sendak was going to win. I’m sure he can come up with a way to beat Zarkon.”

Everyone smiles at Shiro, who still hasn’t managed to wipe the grin off his face, even though he’s ready to cry yet again, over the pronouns Hunk just used for him. The amount of faith they’re putting in him is overwhelming - sure, come up with a way to topple the regime of a ten thousand-year-old emperor, no problem. He won’t let them down, though. For this amazing group of people who can somehow see him for who he is, Shiro would take on a whole galaxy. And with them backing him up, he can’t possibly fail.

**Author's Note:**

> [Apache Shiro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Shiro) is a real thing.


End file.
